War is the nest of all contradictions.
—Randall Jarrell
Driving west from Middlefield as the sun
Burns in my rearview mirror, and a disc
Of moon hung low as if draped in gauze.
A wraith of mists appears then vanishes
With each curve and hill of this road,
Tracking the East Branch of the Cuyahoga
On its crooked path to Erie.
There is little wind. As I draw closer, the mists hold still.
That sun climbs crowns of maple, oak and beech still green.
This silence seems a solace worth remembering,
So I pull off the road to savor what I can.
Here drifts a memory of sun and moon.
There was a village near a mountain
A temple of peace beneath the village,
A crane rising with a poem in its beak.
In the low black water here, a snapper’s head appears
Downstream, searching, its eyes shining.
In a jolt of quivering some unspoken dread appears,
The air shifts like shafts of ice, as if
The Dragons of Eden wake their spines
Of hatred, and the air snaps scaly cold.
As if solace felt too deeply is a danger we ignore.
Always a before, a now, an after that binds our dreams.
A semi hits a rut with an explosion.
The wars go on and on.
As we go on and on.
—
David Adams is a poet living in Burton, Ohio. He has been a laborer, academic and technical writer. Hope As a Construction, his 11th collection of poems, was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2023. His prose memoir, Casual Labor, was published by Blue Shale Books in 2021. David collaborated with the composer Dawn Sonntag to complete Clara: A Life and Death in Shadow, an opera in three acts about Clara Haber.
